Trump surrounded himself with military people to look 'macho' — only for them to spill the beans on his Ukraine plot: MSNBC analyst

On MSNBC's "AM Joy," Bloomberg Opinion editor and MSNBC commentator Tim O'Brien noted a key irony in President Donald Trump's Ukraine scandal: His obsession with surrounding himself with military figures may ultimately be what got him caught, and why he now faces impeachment.

"Donald Trump is a performance artist," said O'Brien. "He doesn't care about public policy or the public good. He cares about being center stage and he is profoundly aware the power of television and how people can be influenced by others in front of a screen who have credibility. And not only these people have credibility, they're military. Trump has pride on surrounding himself with military advisors, he sees them as macho, he sees them as authoritative."

"And now those very people are going to go before the American public and say the president of the United States not only was a participant, he was the ringleader, of an extortion scheme, the goals of which were to smear a political rival and do a favor, I think ultimately, for Russia, which is to weaken Ukraine," said O'Brien. "So the national security threat is in the White House. And that is a story, I think, that will come out of this testimony from people who are essentially defining themselves as nonpartisan actors, they care about public policy, they care about civil service, they spent years in this before Trump came into the White House, before Obama was in the White House. And it got upended by someone pursuing something that was entirely self-serving."

Watch below: